China’s “.cn“ is the second most popular top-level domain in the world, says respected domain dealer Verisign. According to the poll data, the Chinese domain experienced an astonishing 76% growth rate in the year 2008. Much to the surprise of no one, the most popular domain in the world continues to be the venerable “.com.” Despite this, many within the industry see the emergence of “.cn” as proof of a “slow drift” towards the use of country-code domains. Use of these domains have risen as much as 26%, compared to the 16% posted by “.com” and “.net.” Rounding out the top five are Germany’s “.de” and long time favorites “.net,” and “.org.”

Elsewhere, it seems as if BOSS is a smashing success. The service, which allows users to build and maintain their own search engines based upon the Yahoo framework, receives around ten million search queries a day. “10 million in and of itself isn’t particularly significant,” writes Bill Michaels on the official Yahoo Search Blog. “[That said], we believe growing to more than 100 queries a second in just over 5 months says something about the demand for an open search platform.” Just because the service has found initial success with its core group of users doesn’t mean that the BOSS team will be taking it easy in the coming year. Says Michaels: “We still have a great deal of work ahead, but the feedback we’ve received [proves] that there really was a need for a service like BOSS to help power innovation in search.”

In advertising news, Google has officially upgraded its AdWords advertising service to accommodate mobile web browsers that support the “full HTML” coding standard. Unofficially referred to as “desktop ads” by the Google Mobile team, the system relies on a combination of full graphics and text, similar to the ads found in desktop-based computing. The idea behind the new platform is to provide a literal “on-the-go” advertising option without forcing advertisers and site owners to create a specialized landing page. The result is an easy to use, hassle-free experience that yet is still customized specifically for mobile users. The new advertising option is available now for all users.

Next, Adobe has officially unveiled Zoetrope, a web application designed to manipulate data from both the present and the past. Unlike the Internet Wayback Machine which only saves full copies, Zoetrope uses a newly created query language to save different sections of a site. Users could then use the stored information to perform several usually difficult tasks, including the study marketplace trends, the creation of graphs that show those trends, and even the comparison of several different groups of materials. Although the software is currently under development, the actual release date for Zoetrope is unknown at this time.

Finally, blogger Jeff Johnson has written an insanely in-depth “how-to” concerning the world of social bookmarking. In the aptly-titled Social Bookmarking Tutorial, Johnson explains what exactly social bookmarking is, the kinds of bookmarking sites out there, and most importantly, how you can use sites such as these to help promote your business. Chock full of information, Johnson’s write up is perfect for nearly everyone, from beginners to those who need a bit of a “refresher course.”